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Bridging the Gap Between Craft and Technology: John Maeda at The Adobe Museum of Digital Technology

John Maeda, the President of the Rhode Island School of Design and one of the world’s foremost design thinkers, presents a brand new exhibit at the uniquely virtual Adobe Museum of Digital Media. The exhibit, entitled “Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC)” will run from March 23 - December 31 on Adobe’s all-online museum.

The idea behind the exhibit is to bridge the gap and analyze the connection between the digital world, the physical world and the world of craft. Maeda’s take is not that digital creativity is replacing physical, handcrafted creativity — instead, it is that the two are overlapping to become the same creativity, or what Maeda has called “the neue Craft”. In the online exhibit, Maeda will use info-graphics, video and audio to show how traditionally physical craftsmanship is being shifted into a more digital space, with traditionally analog tools such as pens and brushes being used to manipulate digital images. Maeda himself elaborates on this in a recent Design Weekblog post: “Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form – the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But just as it took Icarus to first imagine human flight by carefully observing how birds can fly, digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world.”

To view a preview video of the exhibit, head on over to the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, and be sure to visit again on March 23rd when the exhibit officially opens.